Abstract
Globally, more than 1.5 billion people have hearing loss. Unfortunately, most people with hearing loss reside in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where traditional face-to-face services rendered by trained health professionals are few and unequally dispersed. The COVID-19 pandemic has further hampered the effectiveness of traditional service delivery models to provide hearing care. Digital health technologies are strong enablers of hearing care and can support health delivery models that are more sustainable. The convergence of advancing technology and mobile connectivity is enabling new ways of providing decentralized hearing services. Recently, an abundance of digital applications that offer hearing tests directly to the public has become available. A growing body of evidence has shown the ability of several approaches to provide accurate, accessible, and remote hearing assessment to consumers. Further effort is needed to promote greater accuracy across a variety of test platforms, improve sensitivity to ear disease, and scale up hearing rehabilitation, especially in LMICs.
Highlights
More than 1.5 billion people globally have hearing loss; for nearly half a billion people, it is of a disabling degree [1]
The emergence of digital health technologies has been identified as an important trend to support scalable hearing health delivery models that are sustainable [2,3]
Apple smartphones are limited in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) [30]
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Digital technologies have increasingly demonstrated the potential to increase hearing health access via remote self- or community-health-worker-facilitated testing [5,16,17,18]. Traditional hearing evaluation setups are often in confined spaces such as soundproof booths, with long appointments and several tests involving equipment placement on and off the patient, all of which increase the risk of infection [19] This is especially challenging in typical patients with hearing loss due to their advanced age and resultant mortality and morbidity risk [20]. While much research has been done on telehealth within the hearing healthcare space, the landscape for remote hearing assessment is quickly changing due to better access to mobile technology and internet connectivity. Remote care may aid in removing the ongoing access hurdles of formal audiological services and by providing context-appropriate solutions during the pandemic
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